Tales my mother never told me

There's one problem Claire Rayner always refused to discuss: her own childhood. Now that she's revealed an early life of parental abuse, what does her son Jay Rayner make of her secret - and the grandparents he never knew?

I am standing in a Church of England cemetery near Cirencester, by the graves of my grandparents. It is an attractive, if curious, last resting place for a couple of East End Jews, here amid the snowdrops of a Gloucestershire churchyard. Then again, there were a lot of curious things about Peter and Betty, from the robustly un-Jewish surname carved on their gravestones - Chetwynd - to the fact that I never met them. This had nothing to do with me arriving after they had departed. I was 15 when they died, within months of each other, in 1982. It was far less accidental than that. I never saw them because my mother didn't see them either. She broke off contact when she was in her late teens.

Until very recently, the only explanation I could have given you was that they had gifted her a dismal childhood, but I could have added no detail. It was not that my mother's history was a secret but it was hidden, by a clear and pronounced desire on her part not to go there. I never questioned this as a kid, nor indeed resented it. I told friends who asked that there were maternal grandparents out there somewhere, but that I had never met them. Simple as that. I imagined it made me interesting, this blank in the narrative.

Finally, the blank has been filled. I have met my grandparents, albeit on the pages of my mother's autobiography. This, too, needs explaining, although probably a little less so than other things in this story for, while I have rarely made the connection in print, it is no secret that my mother is Claire Rayner. For 30 years, she has been, for want of a better word, famous, first as a novelist, broadcaster and dispenser of medical and emotional advice through various newspaper problem pages, more latterly as a campaigner on social and health issues.

This presents an obvious irony: that while she was more than prepared to discuss the dark, shadowed corners of other people's lives, she did not seem willing to discuss her own. When, a few years ago, she appeared on Anthony Clare's radio programme, In the Psychiatrist's Chair, an invitation she told me she couldn't refuse precisely because she had spent so long asking other people about their emotional lives, he pushed her so hard for the facts of her childhood that she burst into floods of tears on air. And still she would say no more than that she knew what it was to be an abused child.

I remember at one of the large parties my parents liked to throw in the Eighties, the actor Donald Sinden asking my mother whether she had ever considered writing her memoirs. 'Oh no,' she replied. 'I would consider it a terribly self-regarding thing to do.' How she blushed. Sinden was asking, of course, because he had just signed a contract to write his own. In the late Nineties, my wife, a book editor, suggested Claire at least write an account of her half-century in the NHS to coincide with its fiftieth anniversary in 1998. She said it was a terrific idea. And did nothing about it.

Then, two years ago, came a diagnosis of breast cancer and her decision to be very public about it. 'I think it made people sit up and take notice,' she told me recently. Was that because they thought she was on the way out? I asked. 'Something like that,' she said wryly. It helped that the approach, when it came, was from Virago, a publisher she admired. It helped, too, that they got out the chequebook with enthusiasm. But the clincher was the rumour of an unauthorised biography. Bugger that, my mother said. If anybody's going to tell Claire Rayner's story, it would be Claire Rayner. Last year, she began writing.

My mother and I talk on the phone most mornings. The woman I spoke to through those months was clearly going somewhere very dark, pulling lumps out of herself to get the story down. I could hear her slumping back into the depression that has long dogged both Claire and my father, Des. Then there was the detail. She had written 30,000 words, she told me at one point, and not yet reached her tenth birthday. The book would be 120,000 words she said on another occasion, and then it rose to 140,000, perhaps 150,000. Oh god. Was this writing or therapy?

At the end of last year I received the manuscript, which I approached with trepidation. Despite my cheerleading phone calls, I was not entirely convinced that I wanted to read about the horrors of my mother's early life. Would it really help me understand her any better? I suspected not. But it could distress me and who needs that? What's more, I am now a parent and any story about child abuse or neglect upsets me hugely, much more so than it used to do. To read such things about your own mother when young could be a complex bit of psychodrama, to say the least.

Still, I had no choice. She would want to know and I couldn't bluff it. So, one Saturday lunchtime I sat down to read. I finished at noon the next day. The story is remarkable, and would be even if its author had not gone on to become well known. Though I knew how much I did not know, the detail was still astounding. My mother was born in Stepney in 1931, the first of three girls and a boy. My grandmother, Betty Dion, was an orphan, furious at the world for the poor hand that had been dealt her. My grandfather, Peter (originally Percy) Berk, was one of four children of a well-to-do clothing manufacturer, but the black sheep of the family, always in trouble, always scamming, often on the run. Somehow, too young, too angry, always too poor, they found each other.

Betty hated her mother-in-law who she thought looked down upon her (and who probably did) and Claire believes her mother's attitude towards her may have had something to do with her resemblance to her grandmother. It was a childhood very short on love, lived in cluttered flats and cramped digs all over Britain, usually because Peter was on the run again - from the bailiffs, from the police, from business partners. On one occasion, the kids were instructed to assume a new surname - Brandon - to help hide them away.

Then, during their first stay in Cirencester, they changed it altogether by deed poll to Chetwynd, a name of the local Gloucestershire nobility. Betty was a furious snob, would claim to strangers that she was 'from Kensington, don't you know', to my mother's intense embarrassment. Becoming a Chetwynd helped the family hide away and made the fantasy a little more real.

There were endless beatings that left Claire battered and bruised, and a lot of casual cruelty. Birthdays were never remembered, compliments and encouragement never given. She was the problem child, the big mouth, too clever by half. 'I was despised,' she told me later, summing up those pages.

Did this upset me as I had feared? Yes, but in a less histrionic manner than I had expected. There was something terribly numbing about this litany of neglect and disdain. Curiously, the moment that did get to me, that had me crying over the manuscript at the kitchen table, was when she was evacuated during the war to a family in Yorkshire, the Exleys, who, in her own words, 'were lovely, warm, affectionate and, above all, courteous people, who made me feel welcome and wanted'. She had got away. But of course it didn't last and she was soon dragged back into the dark maw of my grandparents' ragged, chaotic life.

They were, as much as anything, terribly feckless. When she was seven, they simply went out for the night, leaving her in charge of two small girls until concerned neighbours called the police. At 14, Claire escaped her parents for the first time by lying about her age to begin nursing, but she was dragged back to the family house, and her cover blown, when Peter and Betty disappeared for a week's holiday, leaving her terrified sister in charge of the others.

Her second attempt at escape, when she again lied about her age to return to nursing, ended when my grandmother threatened to sue the hospital for enticing a minor away from her legal guardians. The family had moved to Canada and were insisting Claire follow. She travelled by ship to Toronto but, ground down by her parents, soon ran away to the US. She worked in a diner in New York as a waitress, even got involved in a season of summer stock in Wilmington, Vermont. I find this image of my mother, as a teenager, at large in the US in the late 1940s, bizarre, intriguing and glamorous, though she insists it was anything but.

It all came to an end when she developed Graves' disease, a condition of the thyroid, and had no choice but to return to Toronto. There, a doctor took pity on her. Her parents were clearly now unconcerned; they refused to accompany her to this emergency appointment, probably because they feared there might be bills involved. What she needed was rest, the doctor said, lots of it, and it was obvious she would not get it with them. Instead, he suggested she allow herself to be sent to Toronto Psychiatric Hospital, where she could get the care she needed. Claire had always been happiest in hospitals, working as a nurse. They had been her first means of escape. She said it sounded like a splendid idea.

She remained there for 15 months, during which time my grandparents did not visit once. She also began to display appropriately flamboyant psychotic behaviour, mostly copying from other patients to get the nurses' attention. She was force-fed, strapped down on a trolley, for refusing food; shoved into a tub of warm water, covered by a tarpaulin with only a hole for the head, a treatment used to placate the manic; bound up in cold, wet sheets to make her immobile. Eventually, another doctor recognised that what she really needed was not containment, but surgery on the thyroid. That would sort her out. It would either have to be paid for in Canada or she would have to return to Britain for treatment on the new NHS.

True to form, Betty and Peter refused to pay either for the surgery or passage home. The medical staff came up with an ingenious if drastic solution. By law, the shipping firm Cunard was required to carry free of charge anybody it had brought to Canada who was subsequently deported. Accordingly, my mother was deported from Canada, her passport stamped 'insane, appeal denied', a bureaucratic record of her parents' neglect. She never saw them again. Back in Britain, in the care of her grandmother, and her aunts and uncles, she could get treatment, return to nursing and her life could begin.

Was this really all new to me? Pretty much, yes. The only thing I can ever remember my mother telling me about my grandparents before I read the book was that, if she had been given some money of her own, say by her own grandmother, Betty would talk it out of her or Peter would nick it; one would be manipulative, the other a thief. Either way, they would get their hands on it.

But, for all the extra information I now possessed, I still had questions. I knew what to do though. As kids, coming home from school, my brother, sister and I would often find journalists at the kitchen table, notebooks out, heavy with questions about sex education, or marital strife or her latest novel. Our arrival home, grabbing at biscuits laid out for that day's interviewer, would usually be reported as the local colour. (There were always media of one kind or another floating around us when we were young. The first professional photograph was taken of me when I was six hours old, to be used as the cover shot for one of my mother's books on childcare.) I seem to recall Claire enjoying the process, as long as it didn't stray too far into the dreaded past. Well, now she could experience it again, but with a twist - this time the interviewer would be her youngest son.

We meet for lunch in London, away from the distractions of domestic life. Des comes too. He has been at her side these past 45 years and he should be there now. In any case, I am intrigued to find how much he knew and when. So, Mum, why didn't you tell us anything? 'Why load you with my misery?' she says. 'Did I want your pity? No. Did I want your gratitude? No. If you care for your children, you want to protect them from anything unpleasant.' But that, I say, isn't the whole story, is it? I remem ber when we were all edging into adolescence, we asked for a bit more detail. One of us insisted it was our right to know. Claire wept bitterly. And still told us nothing. 'No, it wasn't all altruism. I didn't want to talk about it because I knew I'd get upset and then I'd lose some of my grown-up status.'

And what did Des know? 'The first thing related to the passport,' he says. They wanted to go abroad but Claire was convinced she couldn't because of the 'insane' stamp. 'So I went to Petty France and got her a new one,' Des says, simply. 'He was a hero on a white charger,' Claire says. Did he ever meet her parents? 'Once, fleetingly,' he says. By the kind of coincidence common in a Jewish community dominated by the rag trade, Des ended up working fora fashion firm owned by one of Claire's cousins.

My grandparents came back for a visit in the early Sixties and the boss announced that they would be coming in to see him. '"In which case,"' Des told him, '"I'll stay in my office." But he still called me up to see him. I saw them sitting there, turned around and left.'

He had no reason to doubt what Claire had said about them; there was, he says, so much corroborating evidence from other family members. Indeed, despite Claire admitting that she was 'suspicious of family', she stayed in touch with a fair slab of it. There were her siblings, all of whom remained in North America where they married and whom we saw occasionally over the years. And there was her father's late brother, the wonderful Max and his wife Muriel, who became surrogate parents and grandparents. But of Peter and Betty not a word was said, at least not when the children were around.

It turns out that there was a little more contact than I at first thought. 'When I got engaged [in 1956], I wrote to them in Canada, told them I was marrying an actor who wrote plays,' Claire says. 'I wanted to say, "Look what I've done without you". Immediately, they wrote back saying they were coming.' What was all that about? 'They thought he had money. I wrote back and said he was a poor, impecunious actor and I never heard another word.' In the late Sixties, they returned from Canada for good. 'I was terrified,' Claire says. 'It filled me with cold horror. I knew they were going to make trouble.'

I suggest that, had the situation existed now - a famous daughter having no contact with her parents - it would have been spread across the tabloids, in gory detail. After all, by 1972 Claire was very well known: she had her problem page in the Sun, a slot on Pebble Mill at One, and her novels were bestsellers. She says it could easily have happened then, and almost did. 'I got a phone call from Marje Proops one days,' she says. Marje was then her direct competitor on the Daily Mirror. 'She told me she had received a letter from a Betty Chetwynd of Cirencester who was claiming to be my mother and saying what a terrible, terrible daughter I was.' What did you do? 'I just said, "Oh Marje we all get these daft letters from cranks, don't we?" And that was the end of it.'

A little later, a rabbi, travelling in the West Country, stumbled across these two old Jews in Cirencester, thoroughly out of place. 'He telephoned me and said I should get over it and make contact with my parents. I told him I was very happy living in the present.' Finally, in 1982, she received a call from a neighbour of theirs to say they had both died. 'All I felt was intense relief,' she says. But doesn't it seem odd that they should have ended up buried in a church graveyard? Not really, Claire says. 'All her life, my mother was an outsider: the wrong religion, the wrong gender. And she really was a snob. The C of E was the religion of the upper classes. She would have seen it as smarter than being just another bloody Jew.' There is, though, a clue on the grave: an English translation of a line from the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, put there by the relative who paid for the stone. Would Betty have been pleased? I can't help wondering.

I am hugely proud of my mother. She has an innate ability to take complex ideas and communicate them to a mass audience. In another life, she would, I suspect, have become a doctor of high repute, but her influence on the nation's health has been far greater in the role she chanced upon. Yet I cannot claim to be more proud of her for knowing the true wretchedness of her childhood.

Still, I am glad she wrote it, not least because it's such a cracking tale. It occurred to me, as I finished the manuscript, that families are harder to report even than wars. There are, after all, fewer witnesses and no documentary evidence. All we can do is trust our sources and I trust mine. My mother has introduced me to my grandparents; the blanks in my history have been filled in. By the time she did so, Peter and Betty were long dead. But you know what? After all I've read, that suits me fine.